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Book Review of Slavery by another Name by Douglas A. Blackmon
Slavery in the United States did not come to an end with the Confederate forces surrendering themselves in the year 1865. Douglas A. Blackmon, a Wall Street Journal Reporter in his recent Pulitzer Prize-winning book titled ‘Slavery by another Name’ claims that "the great record of forced labor across the South [after the Civil War] demands that any consideration of the progress of civil rights remedy in the United States must acknowledge that slavery, real slavery, didn't end until 1945." In this comprehensible, thoroughly-researched, and revolutionary book, Blackmon explains how the local police practice of arresting, imprisoning, and eventual selling African-Americans into forced labor resulted in industries like manufacturing, quarrying, railways, agriculture, and financial entities to acquire incredible profits between the period when the Civil War concluded and the First World War started.
This system of forced labor ascended in the background of the Civil War and Reconstruction. The people who were popularly called as the Radical Republicans held leadership positions in the Congress immediately after the war ended, and declared a civil rights agenda that encompassed the 13th, 14th, and 15th Amendments of the American Constitution, which essentially forbids slavery, provision of citizenship and equal protection to the African-Americans, as well as voting rights for the African-American men.
Republicans also enacted the Civil Rights Act of 1870, which offered the provision of federal resources being spent for the enactment of these laws. This resulted in millions of dollars being invested into construction of public schools and universities for the so called "freedmen." For a brief stint in the American history, it appeared as if the seeds of equality have a chance to be planted for the African-Americans who encompassed roughly 40 percent of the earlier Coalition, but who had been omitted from the political exemplification or the American economic power.
In the preface section of the book, Blackmon informs the readers that the book is actually a story that he followed as the Wall Street Journal’s Atlanta bureau chief. He exposed the fact that numerous American corporations, including the U.S. Steel, benefited massively from what was fundamentally slave labor at plethora of industrial locations all through the South. The detection of this fact motivated Blackmon to explore the ineffable story of slavery in the years subsequent to the Civil War, a true tale that was omitted from the nation's understanding of the Civil War and the years that followed.
Blackmon emphases predominantly on Alabama; however, he also presents robust evidence that this kind of peonage was prevalent all through the entire South, which affecting more than one lakh African-Americans. This was essentially part of a much broader endeavor of the Southern whites in the subsequent years of Reconstruction to reaffirm the racial order of the colonial years.
This book of Blackmon offers a significant chronological basis for an undefended and truthful dialogue about recompenses for slavery. This work of Blackmon is certainly persistent and fascinating. It discloses what has been a customarily uncharted and crucial element of American history. It creates a comprehensive racial, cultural, and a political framework of trials that have troubled Mr. Blackmon and will certainly haunt the people who read this book.
Works Cited
Blackmon, Douglas A. Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II . NY: Anchor Books, 2009.
